With a change in leadership on a key panel, the new GOP U.S. House majority is expected to focus on censorship of conservatives online by the likes of Alphabet subsidiaries Google and YouTube and Facebook, among others.
The House Judiciary Committee on Friday announced Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie will serve as the head of the antitrust subcommittee.
Emily Birnbaum and Maria Curi for Bloomberg News:
The appointment was a snub to Colorado Republican Ken Buck, one of the main House GOP critics of big tech companies, who was the panel’s ranking member in the last Congress.
Buck has urged Republicans to support updates to US antitrust laws to take on Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. He also worked across the aisle with Democrats on antitrust legislation and big tech investigations.The appointment of Massie, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained inventor who has filed dozens of patents, signals that the Judiciary Committee under Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio will shift its focus away from legislation aimed at curbing the power of the largest tech companies. Jordan has been more focused on free-speech issues, including big tech’s perceived liberal bias.
“We’re all united in wanting to stop the censorship of conservatives and the suppression of free speech,” Jordan said in an interview. “That’s going to be a focus of the full committee work.” … Jordan said he isn’t against antitrust legislation, but opposes bills that “would empower big government to further work with big tech to censor conservatives, which is what I thought the Democrat bills in the last congress were designed to do.”
MacDailyNews Take: Potter Stewart said it best: “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.”
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